naked cap: Who Will Wind Up Holding the Bag in the Shale Gas Bubble?

SF New Mexican: Officials - Hiker found north of Santa Fe ski basin died of hypothermia.

In late JULY, note. When we’re nearly at our hottest temps. I keep banging on about this, but you can so easily be hiking, have a thunderstorm crest those mountains, and experience a 60 degree temperature drop in minutes. I see so many people, too far from the trailheads, woefully unprepared. I do stop and advise (gently), when there’s an opportunity.

365/2: 322. Meet ‘Flit’, our wintering hummingbird.

We have a wintering hummingbird. Up at 6AM to give him warm sugar water (it’s below 27 at night here, when sugar water freezes). He’s skittish as all get-out, and I have to sneak up on him to get any image at all. Tight crop, through a screen. Hopefully he’ll get tamer if he sticks around.

Job #1 right now is keeping him alive through these cold nights. The skittish behavior is something we’ve observed before, when instinct takes over. He obviously would love to migrate, but can’t lace up enough food sources to make it ... so he’ll disappear for a day, half a day, and then reappear. If he could make it to the Bosque down in Albuquerque, he’d have food sources all the way down to Mexico. It’s this first 75 miles that’s brutal for late migrators.

SciAm: Fracking Threatens to Crack Politics.

The Atlantic: It’s Coming - $65 Oil.

A welcome reprieve. I still maintain most of Clinton’s ‘good economy’ was the result of lower energy prices. Notice the Fed is making noise about ending the stimulus. Interesting timing. I hope this puts the kibosh on new fracking starts - they want to encroach Chaco. That’s a big NO from me.

Self-absorbed Instagrammer defaces National Parks.

This makes me livid. Most know I spent over half a year working in Big Bend National Park in between years of college. We spent a great deal of our time trying to preserve things for future generations. I cannot even begin to express how impenetrably self-absorbed this young lady is.

I say put her on the Park Service’s lowest payscale job. She works as long as it takes to pay for the remediation of the damage she caused, plus a generous fine. Lives in park housing, eats park meals.

Normally, I’d say she needs to visit a psychologist, but I find hard work often smooths out such narcissism. Working in a park, she’ll learn to appreciate it ... make her work with the public, she’ll learn how obtuse the average park visitor can be. She will experience her behavior as in a mirror, and have to deal with the repercussions. Every. Single. Day.

She must be an example, a deterrent. Otherwise more will follow. More will follow anyway, but a proper balanced punishment will go far to prevent this behavior from spreading.